Page 126 of Vicious Hearts

“No one is ever going to fucking hurt you, understand?” he growls quietly into the top of my head. “I’ll never let anything happen to you ever again.”

The safest I’ve ever felt, in the arms of monster.

Who knew.

28

CILLIAN

“That isn’t fucking possible.”

Ares’ authoritative voice cuts through the stunned silence of my office at the Upper East Side brownstone. Besides Ares, the other faces in the room include Castle, Hades, Kratos, Dimitra, and New York City Director of FBI Operations Shane Dorsey.

It’s been two days since Una and I visited Hope House, where she got a call from the afterlife. I’ve just told them all what happened.

Una dealt with moving past everything she told me by burrowing under the covers for a full twenty-four hours before deciding she had to get out. Currently, she’s having lunch with Neve, Eilish, and Callie at Neve and Ares’ penthouse apartment.

Idealt with it by tracking down a serial rapist the police have been looking for in Sheepshead Bay,geldinghim, choking him with his own severed balls, and then cutting him from chin to navel and watching the blood spiral down a storm drain in the middle of the dark alley where I found him.

I still don’t feel any less murderous. Or hateful. Or full of absoluteragefor the things that piece of shit did to Una and her brother in that foster home, when they were goddamn children.

“Didyouhear him?”

Dimitra’s melodic, heavily Mediterranean accent always exudes a certain power when she speaks. She might be a tiny, frail little thing. But I know foolish men have died thinking the Drakos matriarch is anything less than the hurricane force to be reckoned with that she is.

I shake my head. “I didn’t. But she heard what she heard.”

“Or she’s making shit up—”

Ares doesn’t finish his words, and the room explodes into shouting as I close the distance between us in a quarter of a second and grab him by the collar.

“That is thelast fucking timeyou speak of her like that,” I snarl as he grits his teeth and grabs at my own collar, ignoring the yells from his brothers and Castle to back off, both of us.

“She’s yourpretendfucking wife, Cillian!” he shouts in my face.

“And what isNeve, Ares?” I hurl back. “Or rather, whatwasNeve, when our two families stopped a war?!”

The room goes quiet. Ares looks away, shaking his head. He releases his grip on my collar and exhales slowly. When he turns back, his jaw grinds as his eyes meet mine.

“Okay, I apologize. That was way out of line.”

I drop my own grip on him, both of us moving back a step as the tension melts a little.

Ares shoves his fingers through his hair and eyes me. “You trust her?”

“I do.”

It comes out faster than I expected or intended. Ares just nods slowly.

“Well, okay then. But that doesn’t change the fact that Seamus O’Conor is fuckingdead, Cillian.” His mouth thins as he jabs a finger at his shoulder. “You might have forgotten, but I shot him in the fuckingheart, through myowngoddammed body.”

“It hasn’t exactly slipped my mind.”

It never will. Crashing through the fucking door of that godforsaken hunting cabin in the woods.

Blood everywhere.

Neve so fucking pale with her life blood in a puddle around her, next to a dying—or possibly already dead—Ares.

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